Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Staunton, February 26 – Many Moscow
natives do not identify themselves as Muscovites, a Russian sociologist says,
while some who have moved to the city, particularly those who have been there
more than ten years, identify strongly with it, just two of the many paradoxes
of life in the Russian capital.

In an article on the Postnauka.ru
site, Viktor Vakhshtayn, a sociologist who teaches at the Presidential Academy
of Economics and State Service, says that one of the most intriguing paradoxes
of Moscow is that “an enormous number of people live in this city without
noting that they live in it” (postnauka.ru/faq/9646).

For most of them, he continues,
recent surveys conducted by the Moscow Institute of Social-Cultural Programs
and the Public Opinion Foundation, “Moscow is not a city;” instead, it “is the
administrative company of the country.”That creates a very different relationship between its residents and
their self-identifications.

About 60 percent of Moscow’s
residents were born somewhere else, and about 40 percent are people who were
born there. According to the surveys, “about 60 percent of the people who
continuously live and work in Moscow do not feel themselves to be Muscovites in
any way.”But that 60 percent is not
made up entirely of the 60 percent born elsewhere.

“In fact,” Vakhshtayn says, “among
those who live in Moscow, continuously work here, and do not connect in any way
with this place, 20 percent were born” in the city. Another 30 percent of this
group, he adds, is made up of people who arrived in the Russian capital more
than a decade earlier.

At the same time, “the
most-intensely-held Muscovite identity is shown by people who were not born [in
the capital] but who have lived in Moscow more than ten years; that is, those
for whom this move was a serious achievement, possibly their main life plan
because for them, this was an identity that they won, unlike the case of many
native urban residents.”

“The underlying metaphor through
which people who continuously live in Moscow see their city is that of ‘the
city as office.’”It is “an enormous
multi-million roomed office, something like F[ritz] Lang’s [classic film]
‘Metropolis.’” It is not a place where “as a rule,” those who earn money want
to spend it. Instead, they go elsewhere.

This has some important
implications, Vakhshtayn points out. “The archetype of social space was the
agora in the ancient Greek polis. It was not so much a place in which you were
comfortable and which you went to spend time with friends asa space in which
the city recognize itself as a city.”

Such a space is where an urban
identity is formed, he says. “And if there is no place in which you feel your
tie with this strange meta-city formation, then an urban identity will not be
formed.” Moscow for many people lacks such a space, and that in turn creates
some unusual circumstances.

One of those was revealed when
double-decker buses were introduced in Moscow. They completely transformed “the
picture of the world” which residents had. Their sudden appearance has had the
effect of giving people a chance “to see the space they have not noticed up to
then with new eyes.”

Vaynshtayn adds that his research
shows that in Moscow at least, “the demand for the activities of the institutions of culture is
far from the most significant,” unlike what most people assume. Far more
significant are “a demand for events because events are what creates a city in
time” and one “for a cultural milieu” through which people can travel.”

Another “ paradoxical fact” in Moscow is that
parents are far more comfortable sending their child for walks in the city
center than allowing him or her to play in the yard. “Their own district seems
to them a much less secure place than does” the latter.This is a very different pattern than the one
found elsewhere.

One needs “to understand,” he says,
that this lack of identity is “a logical result of the fact that Moscow is a
met-city formation,” that is, it is “a multi-space object” in which many
different spaces intersect.That makes
it more difficult for individuals to craft an identity and then accept it for
themselves.

This can be seen by comparing Moscow
to other cities.“What makes Petersburg
Petersburg?” The answer is simple: the places within the city like Palace
Square and the Neva, none of which can be taken away. But “those relations
which make Moscow Moscow are primarily those which are not localized on its
territory” but rather outside its borders.

Those objects include among others
Sheremetyevo, Domodedova and the Moscow region. And thus “half of these urban
objects could be moved and no one would notice it. Thus, those stable relations
which form Moscow today as an urban unity are not in the full sense of the word
“’Muscovite.’”